Long Beach City Council members Tonia Reyes Uranga and Bonnie Lowenthal want to run for the California State Assembly’s 54th District seat this year. Before they actually go through with it, however, they’ve got to lose an election.
The candidacies of Lowenthal and Reyes Uranga hinge on the defeat of Proposition 93, the Term-Limit-Tweaking initiative on the [...]

How big was Mayor Bob Foster’s announcement Tuesday at his State of the City address that Long Beach will be the host city for the 2009 TED Conference? Not too. The annual gathering is by invitation only, and organizers only send out 1,000 invitations.
But how important was Foster’s announcement? Pretty darn — which I learned a [...]

Josh Lowenthal, a thus-far-private citizen from Long Beach’s most-prominent political family, has been contacted by top officials of the Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce about running for the Board of Education seat that may soon be vacated by the Chamber’s effort to recall Michael Shane Ellis.
Altogether now: “What th–?!?”
“We sat down with Josh,” confirms Randy Gordon, [...]

There was another horrifying crash — you can check out the photos by Daniel DeBoom on LBreport — last night at the three-way intersection of Seventh Street, Alamitos Avenue and Martin Luther King Avenue. The latest smashup occurred only a few hours after The District’s cover story on The Battle for Armory Park — a plan to simplify the confusing intersection [...]

It happened way back in 1998, but the experience came back to me as I read Theo Douglas’ account — a few items down in this column — about getting pulled over last night by a cop who told him his license-plate light was out … when it wasn’t. With me, it was a tail light. Well, [...]

GET ELECTED TO THE LONG BEACH CITY COUNCIL!
Four seats are open — the even-numbered ones: districts 2, 4, 6 and 8 — on the nine-member panel that calls the shots in Big Town. If you’re feeling lucky and popular or internally driven by a desire for power and/or public service (be sure it’s not just gas), you’ve got [...]

Gerrie Schipske, Long Beach’s bloggin’ councilwoman, presents her predictions for 2008, and most of them sound pretty probable — even that part about Bill Pearl of LBreport.com getting to most of the best local stories first … although watch out for the resourceful Theo Douglas. I’m warning you.

Or twice, I don’t remember exactly. But I’m not proud of it, believing as I do that there are certain businesses – record shops, flower shops, running-shoe stores, breakfast spots and coffee houses — that just ought to be indie operations. But a story in Slate presents evidence that the proliferation of Starbucks (15,000 stores and expanding [...]

And am I excused because I’d been drinking and smoking crack when I did it, back on the night when 1986 turned into 1987, standing on the side porch of a Long Beach home a few blocks south of Willow and Magnolia, with my friend Raymond Lewis, the former Verbum Dei star of the early [...]

Robert Garcia and Shaun Lumachi, important players in downtown Long Beach politics who have operated the for-profit website LBPost.com for about a year, finally have a Long Beach business license, according to a story posted today by Bill Pearl on LBReport.com
It was a week ago (Dec. 21) that Pearl broke the story that LBPost.com had been [...]